North City, Fullerwood Park and Nelmar Terrace, seen from the air handler

A February morning on San Marco Avenue

The antique shops are opening, the oaks over the avenue are dumping pollen on everything that holds still, and the first of the year’s “it just doesn’t feel cold” calls comes in from a bungalow a block east. The coil is not broken. It is wearing a mat of yellow felt, and the system has been running against it for two weeks. Up here, the cooling season does not open on a date; it opens when the canopy decides.

North City is the stretch of San Marco Avenue north of the Castillo, with the antique row along the avenue and the residential districts tucked behind it on both sides: Nelmar Terrace to the north, where the old city limit used to run, and Fullerwood Park to the east between the avenue and Hospital Creek. Both are National Register districts. Both are full of houses built between the 1920s and the early 1950s. Neither was built with a duct in it.

What the bungalows are made of

The dominant house in Nelmar Terrace is the Craftsman bungalow or the Colonial Revival cottage of the 1920s: frame on piers, plaster and lath, double-hung windows with weights, a brick chimney, a deep porch. Fullerwood Park runs a little later and a little larger, with 1930s and 40s frame and masonry homes and a handful of 1950s ranches on the eastern streets closest to the creek. Up and down the avenue itself, the commercial buildings are 1920s storefronts with flat roofs, which is where their equipment lives.

For us, the houses sort into two groups. Those that got a duct retrofit decades ago, through the attic or the crawlspace, with an air handler jammed into a hall closet. And those that never did, and run on window units or a single ductless head in the living room with box fans doing the rest.

What we find when we are called

How we handle the districts

Both neighborhoods fall inside the city’s preservation review for anything visible from the street, so outdoor units go on the side or rear elevation, screened, and that placement is in the quote before it is on the application. Where we are replacing an old retrofit, we size against a load calculation rather than the old nameplate, because the old nameplate was usually too big for a house this leaky and the oversizing is why the house feels damp. Where we are adding cooling for the first time, the honest menu is ductless heads, a crawlspace or attic duct system if the house has the room, or a high-velocity system for owners who do not want to see a head on a plaster wall.

The lowest streets in Fullerwood Park back onto Hospital Creek, which rises with the tide and with heavy rain. Equipment there goes on stands and brackets, and the disconnect goes high.

Dispatch from Palm Coast

The bungalow districts are about 42 minutes from Cook’s shop at 37 Fairmont Ln, which is north through downtown on US 1 or around it on I-95 to SR 16 and back east. The phone is staffed all night and the rate does not change after dark. Pollen-season coil cleanings, the ones that turn a “weak AC” call into a ten-minute fix, are the easiest visits we make up here and the most worth scheduling early.